Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@Krieger: At some point, someone's got to stop rebutting the rebuttals to the rebuttals to the rebuttals... Sanders is 'this is the song that never ends' of political threads. There was a lot of things I could have said in response that I chose not to say because this just needs to stop. The petty infighting over what might have beens and could have beens and should have beens, and all the bitterness and condescension that comes with it, is not a healthy environment for the left to consolidate a defensive stand against what has been the worst election in living memory (at least, in MY living memory).
@Crimson Zephyr: As usual, getting into the EC is one of those things that varies on a state-by-state basis. There's almost no real qualifications beyond sucking up to one of the two major political parties enough to get rewarded for it.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.@Julian Lapostat: These are simply smears. No, Bernie Sanders didn't engage
in environmental racism by any definition of the word, didn't write
an essay which says that rape is okay, there is no evidence that there even is a Sandinista video (and it is likely, as this article
points out, that Eichenwald's 'opposition research file' never existed), etc.
Fact is letting people agree-to-disagree on issues has had a bad history in America. It led to Jim Crow where Republicans decided that Reconstruction was a bad idea and threw their constituency under the bus.
Pretending that Hillary wasn't a victim of Mccartyhism, of misogyny and that Sanders could have beaten her but for the evil DNC and their neoliberal embrace of "identity politics" has harmful consequences for the people who now fear they are going to be thrown under the bus because of the tender butthurt of the racist working class.
You can only fight back with the truth, and its important you establish clarity on that. Otherwise, there will be problems later on.
Yeah, okay, this narrative that all Sanders supporters want to do is embrace white nationalists and throw all minorities under the bus has got to stop. People are allowed to have slightly different political priorities or different preferences in campaigning without being called delusional, racist anti-fact ideologues.
The actual politicians have moved on and are having adult conversations like adults. They know their best hope of winning the next cycle is with the support of BOTH factions on the left, full stop. I don't know why their fans bickering on internet forums can't follow their example.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.![]()
Any number of Trump's scandals should have ended him, most of them were far worse than anything Clinton or Sanders was associated with. So we have to ask ourselves, what was it that made him scandal proof. My own hypothesis is that his vastly superior social media operation was a big part of it, and his "outsider" appeal which caused every accusation leveled against him to be dismissed as a smear by the establishment trying to hold him back, and simply based on how Sanders versus Clinton are regarded in the general online world even now, Sanders definitely had the better social media operation of the two. As for the outsider component, yes you can point out that Sanders isn't really an outsider in any meaningful sense of the word, but neither was Trump.
The whole dynamic of this election was one that allowed for some fairly drastic change, and based on how we went from Obama to Trump with an electorate that's essentially composed of the same people, I'd say there's reason to believe the electorate didn't really care about the direction of that change as much as the fact that the candidate represented a significant departure from the status quo. Issues barely even mattered this election, considered how little coverage they got compared to the endless wave of scandals.
If we're not already living the film Idiocracy, we're fast approaching it.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
Except some of the idiots were still self-aware enough to want the one guy who was less of an idiot to make the decisions.
What's happening now is arguably the opposite. People who really should have known better somehow convinced themselves to vote an idiot into power. Because FEELINGS.
edited 28th Nov '16 10:37:40 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedHe was not a politician. He was a businessman billionaire playboy TV Star, of course he's a sleazy, skeevy, pervert. It's more scandalous for Bill Cosby, Mr. Pound Cake and hectoring educational reformer who mocks a sports-scholarship kid, to be exposed than a guy who was openly a weasel for decades. It's more of a scandal for Hillary Clinton and Democrats to be part of the same corporate machinery they are trying to reform. And its more of "a scandal" for Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed socialist, to be the by-the-numbers New Dealer that he actually is and actually be a mainstream democrat in matters of supporting Israel, and the drone program.
The Left's obsession with hypocrisy and authenticity (the whole The Man Is Sticking It to the Man, when historically that has always been how change has happened as seen in the Real Life section there) became a tool for the Right, who said that Trump is a honest hypocrite. I personally blame George Orwell a delusional fanatic who made much of liberal piety by attacking leftists while being himself a liar, a propagandist and a nasty individual...he's the left-wing Ayn Rand.
That's absurd. The electorate that voted in Obama was "the obama coalition" and it was heavily successful in mobilizing young voters, minorities, undecided and stay-at-home. Just because some of them were racist white working class doesn't make it remotely the same electorate. I mean there was a big joke in 2008 about how Obama was getting "the racist vote".
Furthermore John Mccain and Mitt Romney deserve their prize for basic decency for not engaging and activating racist rhetoric and sentiments against Obama. Their elections were issues-based, economics based and was about the policies, whereas Trump's elections was racist from Day 1. I mean he started the whole Birther thing, that was his ticket to a political platform. His big success was that he made that uppity President show his birth certificate...and now he made that uppity President pay for making fun of him at that White House Correspondent's Dinner.
The people who voted Trump in are A) Racist, B) People who don't care that he was racist and so racist enablers and default racists, C) Didn't care one bit about actual economics.
"Why is the stock market so excited for President Trump?"
I'm glad I read this, because I was scratching my head why the stock market has reached record highs after the insane plummet on 11/9. And of course, it doesn't make me very optimistic that the economy will improve for the middle class despite what the stock market says.
It was already fucked under Clinton, because the Beltway didn't even recognize that there was a problem in that regard until Trump pulled the rug out from under them, among many other things the Washginton group-think was blind to. It would have happened more gradually since there wouldn't be many deliberate attempts to dismantle the middle class as there will be under Trump, but letting current trends continue would lead to the same end result.
edited 28th Nov '16 10:54:46 AM by CaptainCapsase
TBF, HRC had a plan in place for retraining in different fields and such since she acknowledged that the coal industry's job opportunities were dwindling. Problem is, her campaign didn't do enough to actually let the voters know about their plan. They overestimated their "Blue Wall".
These people aren't interested in retraining, in part since they were promised the same thing when NAFTA was being signed, and are thus jaded against such claims. Claiming to be able to "bring back" manufacturing jobs and then going ahead with retraining programs in office, with an emphasis on technical work in the sort of automated manufacturing that's increasingly going to be cropping up in the US would be the way to go.
edited 28th Nov '16 10:58:56 AM by CaptainCapsase
"And do you intend to bring some sort of collective punishment against the voting bloc for that transgression?"
I think what Trump will do to them is punishment enough.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

When I was in school, they showed us a short film made by Bill Cosby in 1971, in which he portrayed a bigot. This character hated absolutely everybody: blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians, liberals, conservatives, old people, kids, women, even other bigots.
EDIT: found it.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:56:48 AM by pwiegle
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.